Last week, while reading comments on an article in the Guardian about corruption in the United Kingdom, I was intrigued by a commentator who wrote “Looking at the Corruption Perceptions Index, the key determinant of corruption seems to be race. Singapore, Japan, Barbados and Hong Kong are the only majority non-white countries in the Top 20. The highest ranking African country is Botswana (31). Southern Europe seems to be much less virtuous than the north, as well. Indeed, the highest ranking Ro

The expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) from COSATU in November 2014 was a watershed moment in the post-apartheid labour movement. The expulsion is a product of, and has deepened further, the crisis in the Alliance between the African National Congress (ANC), Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), as well as the internal crises of each of the three component parts of the Alliance.

Students have often been a force for political and intellectual renewal. In recent months, beginning at Wits where students issued a challenge to the curriculum and then in Cape Town and Grahamstown, where they have organised around a set of issues via opposition to the ways in which Cecil John Rhodes has been memorialised, students have once again created a real opening in the sclerosis of the official consensus. If they can sustain that opening, new conversations and new practices will continu

“Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world,” according to the declaration of the International Forum of Agroecology.

More than 200 people took part in the forum, held in Nyéléni, Mali, from February 23 to 27, representing organizations of peasants, indigenous people, agricultural workers, artisanal fisherfolks, and nomadic pastoralists, as well as consumers and other urban people. They met to develop joint strategies to promote agroecology and defend it from corporate co-optation.

The post-apartheid intellectual environment is shaped by a colonial discourse, which equates sounding white with intelligence and cultural sophistication. The main function of this colonial discourse is to normalise white privilege and unmerited prestige. Like the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at UCT, this colonial discourse places whiteness at the centre whilst other discourses that interpret society differently remain on the margins. Whites in post-apartheid South Africa have unrealistic expecta